On the cusp of the Decade, New Year's Eve, 1990, l was sitting at home listening to KQED prognosticate about the future. Around the middle of the evening, they wheeled out someone from the Hoover Institution, who proceeded to make a fairly savvy economic forecast of what would happen in banking in the 1990s. He let us know that the disintegration of the S & Ls was just the beginning; soon, the secondary banks would start folding, until, by the middle of the decade, "five or six super-banks" would control the entire banking industry in the U.S. It is my thesis that "five or six super banks" already controlled the banking industry in America, and that they are, with the exception of the Bank of America, the lineal descendants of the same banks (somewhat altered by subsequent mergers) which purchased the "Class A " stock of the New York Federal Reserve Bank in 1914. These are: Citibank, Chase-Manhattan, Morgan-Guaranty Trust, Chemical & Manufacturers Hanover, (which have merged), and Bankers Trust (also a J.P. Morgan bank). These are the banks which gobbled up the Savings & Loans institutions that defaulted, and went belly up during the Reagan-Bush era. Through networks of holding companies, these banks purchased the S & L's from the government, at cents on the dollar. J.P. Morgan, Sr., the most prominent of the robber barons of the late nineteenth century died in 1913. His son, J.P. ("Jack") Morgan, Jr., succeeded him that year. Sometime during the late Thirties - circa 1937 - the Rockefeller dynasty surpassed the House of Morgan in power and influence, and in the wake of Jack's death in 1943, a "managerial revolution" of sorts dissolved J.P. Morgan & Co. into the Morgan bank, Guaranty Trust. Guaranty Trust, however, is not just any bank. It interlocks with General Electric, General Motors, I.B.M., A.T.&T., General Dynamics, General Mills, Coca Cola, and much more. Its officers in the course of their careers, move in and out of the U.S. Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the International Monetary Fund, and the Bank for International Settlements. The hungry ghost of J.P. Morgan has achieved multinational momentum.
It is a curious phenomenon that certain factions of the Left, while they profess to be Marxists or Progressives, and thus critical of capitalism, characteristically react in a hostile and denunciatory manner whenever someone pursues a critical analysis of the Federal Reserve Bank. Critics of the Federal Reserve are called "right-wing conspiracy theorists," "anti-Semites," and worse. It wasn't always so. Historically, it was axiomatic amongst the non-communist, Old Left in the 1920s and '30s to regard the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank, in 1914, as a kind of bloodless financial coup d'etat by Wall Street over Constitutional government. The Progressive Party Platform of 1924, the Platform upon which Robert LaFollette ran, the Farmer-Labor Platforms from 1920 through 1934, as well as the Socialist Party Platform of 1932, all contained planks calling for the nationalization of the Federal Reserve Bank. (See, National Party Platforms, Vol. 1, 1840-1956, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois). And, if you study the Congressional Record in the years from 1908 through 1913, you will find that the chief opposition to the "Aldrich Plan" and the subsequent Federal Reserve Act of 1913, came from the group known as the "Western Progressives" - amongst whom Robert LaFollette, Sr., George Norris, and Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., were prominent. Charles Lindbergh, Sr., the radical congressman from the Sixth District of Minnesota, presented the most articulate and principled opposition to the Money Trust, and the train of banker-sponsored legislation that led to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Lindbergh's books, Banking and Currency, and the Money Trust, 1913, Why is Your Country at War? 1917, and The Economic Pinch, 1922, were suppressed and quietly removed from practically every library in the country. One book by Lindbergh, The House of Morgan, has disappeared without a trace, even out of the Library of Congress. It has gone into the Orwellian memory-hole, and become a non-book, as if it never existed. The main thesis of Lindbergh's books posets the existence of a Super Trust, developing out of an aglomeration of capital accumulated by a group of American industrial and finance capitalists who are commonly known as the Robber Barons. According to the elder Lindbergh, this group - which included the Stillman- Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Kuhn-Loeb interests - had unified their common interests into a powerful Trust by the early 1870s. They then promoted the Sherman anti-Trust Act, in order to prevent any other, late comers from climbing up to enjoy the Olympian priveleges that they had acquired on their plateau of Wealth. The elder Lindbergh termed this Super Trust the Money Trust. I have given a name to his thesis - the Lindbergh Analysis. The House of J.P. Morgan, and the Morgan banks, Guaranty Trust, and Bankers' Trust, were vitally interested in the foundation of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and were among the "big six" money market prime banks, which purchased the "Class A" stock of the New York Federal Reserve Bank in 1914. Ferdinand Lundberg, familiar to sixties radicals as the author of The Rich and the Super-Rich, wrote, in his far more radical, and specific work, America's Sixty Families, in 1937:
"The Federal Reserve Act was the offshoot of a bill originally presented in the Senate by the dubious Aldrich, whose measure incorporated the collective wisdom of a monetary commission under his chairmanship. The ideas of the commission in turn emanated from the fertile brains of the Wall Street clique, whose deputies worked out the details in 1908 [sic, actually, it was in 1910] at the remote Jekyll Island Club, Jekyll Island, off the Georgia Coast, during an ostensible duck hunting expedition. Among those present Were Paul M. Warburg, partner of Kuhn, Loeb and Company; Henry P. Davison, partner of J.P. Morgan and Company; Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank; Dr. Piatt Andrew, special assistant to the Senate Monetary Commission; and Benjamin Strong, vice-president of the Bankers Trust Company (Morgan). "The protracted Jekyll island conference took place in the atmosphere of an elaborate conspiracy. The trip to Georgia was made in a private car chartered by Aldrich, and the travelers all used assumed names so that the train crew would not establish their identities. For a long time there was no public knowledge that such a conclave had been held. "The financiers wanted a central bank on the European model to facilitate the large-scale manipulation of the national economy... But when Aldrich introduced the scenario produced by the Jekyll Island duck hunters it was immediately hooted down as a nefarious Wall Street enterprise and, for the time being, came to naught. "The task of the liberal Wilson Administration was to place essentially the Jekyll Island measure on the statute books, but in an eccentric guise. The job of drawing up such a bill was given to Paul M. Warburg, one of the Jekyll Island plotters. Warburg collaborated with all the big financiers, as his own memoirs reveal. "The Warburg-Wall Street draft, superficially revised by Wilson and Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, was simply the Jekyll Island duck hunters' scheme for a central bank, dressed up in fancy toggery. There was some opposition to it from uninformed Wall Street quarters, but it was, significantly, endorsed by the American Bankers Association. "In practice the Federal Reserve Bank of New York became the fountainhead of the system of twelve regional banks, for New York was the money market of the nation. The other eleven banks were so many expensive mausoleums erected to salve the local pride and quell the Jacksonian fears of the hinterland. Benjamin Strong, one of the original duck hunters... president of the Bankers' Trust Company, was selected as the first Governor of the New York Reserve Bank. "An adept in high finance, Strong for many years manipulated the country's monetary system at the discretion of directors representing the leading New York banks. Under Strong, the Reserve System, unsuspected by the nation, was brought into interlocking relations with the Bank of England and the Bank of France, greatly strengthening the financial fabric of the political status quo in the western hemisphere. While Wall Street, during and after the World War, moved on to ever enlarging profits, the farmer, whom the Reserve System was ostensibly created to assist, moved from bad to worse."Ferdinand Lundberg, who wrote those lines, was Jewish, and a Leftist, as well. Why then, does the current crop of "New Leftists," two generations later, almost automatically associate criticism of the Federal Reserve Bank with "Right-wing conspiracy theories," and "anti-Semitism"? One reason is that generation of Old Leftists who knew these things are, for the most part, dead. Also, many of the folks who held this analysis during the 1930s found themselves in a position of dire opposition to America's entry into World War II, just as they had been opposed to America entering WW I, in 1917. To oppose the mad rush of America to War, they joined either America First, or the Keep America Out of War Committee, the group headed by Norman Thomas. After the War, there was a certain spiritual/political hardening of the arteries in some of these Old Left cadres - especially in the Midwest - as the Cold War dawned. Although many of them had been enthusiastic about the Soviet experiment in Russia in 1917, they had become thoroughly disgusted with the Stalin regime. Jack Anderson, in McCarthy, the Senator, the Man, the "Ism" touches a bit upon this phenomenon in Wisconsin - of how some of the formerly Progressive LaFollette constituency bolted, in 1946, to become followers of the 'right-wing populism' of Senator Joe McCarthy. This happened in spite of the fact that "Young Bob" LaFollette was an articulate opponent of Communism. As the years rolled, some of the remnants of this strain of old-left populism, who had fallen into McCarthyism, blundered further, and went and joined the John Birch Society. Some were even suckered into joining up with the Liberty Lobby, of Willis Carto, not realizing that it was set up as a shill, to corral and discredit the Lindbergh Analysis. The pervasive influence upon the New Left of the Institute for Policy Studies, funded, at its inception, in 1962, by James P. Warburg, the son of Paul M. Warburg, and plugged ever after into a perpetual grant from the Ford, and Singer Foundations, also accounts for some of the present ennui on the Left, at least in part. I.P.S. cadres, it seems, are conditioned to automatically dismiss criticism of the Fed as manifestation of atavistic anti-Semitism. The Lindbergh Analysis is known amongst them as "the Jewish Banker's Conspiracy". In the greater scheme of the apportioning of dialectical party-lines in post-war America, it has been given to various "right-wing" groups, like the John Birch Society, the so-called "Populist Party" of Willis Carto, the Libertarians, and the N.C.L.C. (LaRouche), to profess various species of opposition to the Federal Reserve - none of which can ever agree. Passages from the 1350-page historical treatise, Tragedy and Hope, by the "liberal imperialist," Carroll Quigley, late professor of history and sociology at Georgetown University, also clarify this question considerably:
"The associations between Wall Street and the Left, of which Mike Straight (publisher of The New Republic) is a fair example, are really survivals of the associations between the Morgan Bank and the Left. To Morgan all political parties were simply organizations to be used, and the firm always was careful to keep a foot in all camps. Morgan himself, Dwight Morrow, and other partners were allied with the Republicans; Russell C. Leffingwell was allied with the Democrats; Grayson Murphy, with the extreme Right; and Thomas W. Lamont, with the Left. Like the Morgan interest in libraries, museums, and art, its inability to distinguish between loyalty to the United States, and loyalty to England, its recognition of the need for social work among the poor, the multi-partisan political views of the Morgan firm in domestic politics went back to the original founder of the firm, George Peabody (1795-1869). To this same seminal figure may be attributed the use of tax-exempt foundations for controlling these activities, as may be observed in many parts of America to this day... "Our concern at the moment is with the links between Wall Street and the Left, especially the Communists. Here the chief link was the Thomas W. Lamont family. This family was in many ways parallel to the Straight family. Tom Lamont had been brought into the Morgan firm, as Straight was several years later, by Henry P. Davison, a Morgan partner from 1909. Lamont became a partner in 1910, as Straight did in 1913. Each had a wife who became a patroness of Leftist causes, and two sons, of which the elder was a conventional banker, and the younger was a Left-wing sympathizer and sponsor. In fact, all the evidence would indicate that Tom Lamont was simply Morgan's apostle to the Left..." "The chief evidence, however, can be found in the files of the H.U.A.C. which show Tom Lamont, his wife Flora, and his son Corliss as sponsors and financial angels to almost a score of extreme Left organizations, including the Communist Party itself... Corliss Lamont was the leading light in another Communist organization, which started life in the 192Os as the Friends of the Soviet Union, but in 1943 was reorganized, with Lamont as chairman of the board and chief incorporator, as the National Council of American Soviet Friendship. "During this whole period of over two decades, Corliss Lamont, with the full support of his parents, was one of the chief figures in "fellow Traveler" circles and one of the chief spokesmen for the Soviet point of view both in these organizations and also in connections which came to him either as son of the most influential man in Wall Street or as professor of philosophy at Columbia University." (pages 945-946, Tragedy And Hope)Quigley is asserting here that the House of Morgan, through the Lamont family, subsidized the Communist Party, and "almost a score of extreme left organizations," as well. Having cited Carroll Quigley, however, I'll concede that Noam Chomsky is correct: there are no conspiracies; there are only institutions. The Morgan prime banks, Guaranty Trust and Bankers' Trust, are only institutions. The Chase-Manhattan, Citibank, Chemical & "Manny Hanny," are merely Institutions. The mechanism by which the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - an Institution - channels, through the Federal Open Market Committee, interest-bearing U.S. Treasury Securities into the coffers of its member-banks, to the profit of the Super-Rich, is Systemic. The manner in which the Commercial banks are able to multiply their reserves by a factor between 7 to 25, to create "credit money" out of thin air, with which to purchase these Government Securities, is also the function of a system - fractional reserve banking. The fact that these bankers might wish to conceal the unpleasant facts of this continual transfer of wealth from the people and from the earth to the ruling class is, understandably, an issue of policy. The fact that Corliss Lamont, son of Thomas Lamont, J.P. Morgan's "apostle to the Left," should have been the financial angel for the Communist Party, USA and of magazines like the (late)Guardian was not a conspiracy. Guaranty Trust, the seat of Corliss Laniont's nest egg, generating interest off tax-exempt Government bonds, is an institution, not a conspiracy. The fact that the Guardian (and other magazines so subsidized) might tend to attack from the "Left" anybody who questions the propriety of the Federal Reserve Bank is not a "conspiracy;" it is a matter of policy. - Mark Walter Evans, - first published in The Sonoma Free Press, 1992 -
